How can myths, legends, and fairytales help us to reclaim the voices, experiences, power, and desires of women in the past?

While women have often been ignored in the official histories of peoples and states, their presence has loomed large in myths, legends, and fairytales, all of which come under the umbrella of ‘folklore’. Throughout the centuries these stories have been used by writers to peak beneath the surface of official history and patriarchal societies to glimpse the powerful presence of the feminine both as an alternative to the male-dominated institutions of church and state, and as the contested landscape which those institutions sought to control.

Focusing on the myths, legends and fairytales produced during the Middle Ages, we’ll explore the ways in which stories of goddesses, fairies, witches, and female warriors served to both enforce and resist societal norms. Finally, we’ll ask what these stories can tell us about how society has conceptualised the feminine as a site of power and desire as well as danger.

Bar opens at 6pm Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7.30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Dr Jennifer Farrell is a lecturer in medieval history at the University of Exeter. With interests in both gender and the medieval supernatural, her research and teaching focuses on cultural developments and their relationship to socio-political changes in Western Europe during the high and late middle ages (c. 1000- c. 1500). She has published on subjects including medieval prophecy; fairies in medieval history and romance; the relationship between literary representations of fairies, the supernatural, and gender; and is currently working on a book focused on Geoffrey of Monmouth and the origins of the Arthurian legends. Her teaching has included undergraduate and postgraduate courses looking at medieval gender and sexuality, universities and learning in the middle ages, magic in the middle ages, sexualities across time and space, and the legends of King Arthur. 

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